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13. A Chorti Tale, Coyote and Rabbit: Told by Lorenza Martínez
- University Press of Florida
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13 A Chorti Tale, Coyote and Rabbit Told by Lorenza Martínez John G. Fought and Isidro González It is fitting that a Chorti1 voice be heard here; all the more so because it is a woman’s. In addition, the unique role of Isidro González in documenting the language and beliefs of his people should be recognized. In my work on Chorti I have always relied on him. He is not just a native speaker, but an experienced translator and interpreter, respected for his knowledge of Chorti culture and tradition. I believe his contribution to my research has been motivated by his strong desire to help preserve the Chorti language and the traditional knowledge embedded in it for as long as possible. He has been especially helpful in explicating this story, which even he regards as very difficult. We are thus truly coauthors here, although I write for both of us and take full responsibility for the contents. This tale stood out among the many I recorded in the mid-1960s. It was the only one in which the speaker used special voices for the main characters . On October 22, 1965, Lorenza Martínez, then fifty-seven, walked from Pelillo to neighboring Guareruche, Jocotán, to tell her favorite story. She was well known for her tales; some people came that day mainly to hear her. It seemed to mark the high point of the day for everyone. For me it is a still-cherished memory. I briefly discussed this text, and quoted a sample, in Fought (1985: 141–42). My emphasis there was on the teller’s use of quotatives as the second element in numerous Mayan couplets that shape the rhythm of the narrative. There are two Coyote and Rabbit episodes in this text. The first (in pause groups 8–377) tells how Rabbit tricked Coyote into burning himself with hot sugar syrup; the second (groups 378–531) tells how he later 173 174 · John G. Fought and Isidro González tricked Coyote into drinking up all the water in a pool to get at what appeared to be a large cheese lying on the bottom; this was a reflection of the full moon, as Coyote learned after his stomach had burst, and just before he was tossed onto a trash heap to die. Both episodes in this story evidently stem from the African diaspora, a matter of some interest in itself . Compared with Chorti narratives spoken by Isidro González (Fought 1972), this text is spoken much faster, with more hesitations that lead to restarts, and more contractions and assimilations of vowel sequences at morphological boundaries. For descriptions of Chorti phonology, morphophonemics , and morphology, see Fought (1967, 1972, 1973, and 1985). Transcription Here I use a slightly modified system of transcription. Note that this is not an orthography. Instead of standardized renderings of each “word,” this transcription gives a record of the spoken text of this narrator’s performance , including pauses, false starts, and most importantly, the complex patterns of variation and integration of meaningful forms that are found in fluent speech. This patterning is lost in a standardized “orthographic ” rendering, and also to a considerable degree in dictated narratives . A string of syllables between consecutive pauses (of any kind) is a pause group. Each paragraph of the text (and its translation) begins with the number of its first pause group, as a finding aid. Note that these components of spoken discourse are all phonologically defined. Grammatical elements such as words and sentences are not always clearly distinguished as segments in ordinary Chorti speech, and still less so in this very rapidly spoken text. Geminate (long) vowels are laryngealized (“creaky”) in the second mora, but I write them as aa instead of a?a. The letter x stands for the voiceless shibilant; plain and ejective stops are written p, ?p, and so on; and the plain and ejective affricates are ts, tx, ?ts, ?tx. Alphabetic symbols are used here to represent bundles of phonological features in their relative order of onset. Thus the falling intonation marker is found at the beginning of its pause group, though the fall is at the end, and ? marks glottal closure whether before a vowel or at the beginning of an ejective consonant, and so on. Weak stress is not marked, but heavy stress is, at syllable onset: uar axana mas ‘he walks more.’ Spaces are used here only as a convenience for reading. Sometimes a space is...